Saturday, 28 May 2016

Do you speak another language?
Many people who have heard this question don’t necessarily speak a
second language (L2) fluently. Learning to speak a new language is
challenging, but fluency in the L2 is a goal many people share.
Contrary to what most people believe, opportunities to interact in
the L2 do not necessarily guarantee a learner will come to speak it
fluently (Derwing, Munro, and Thomson, 2008; Ranta and Meckelborg, 2013), so finding
ways to improve fluency in the classroom is important. From our
recent research, it seems that drama and theatre can help.

If you have ever taken a drama or
theatre class, you will probably agree that it is a lot of fun. But
drama is not all about the entertainment; it can also help language
learners develop speaking abilities (Kao and O’Neill, 1998; Stern, 1980;
Stinson and Freebody, 2006)
and can impact oral fluency and pronunciation in particular (Galante and Thomson, 2016). We
have both taught English as a foreign/second language for many years
in Canada, Brazil, Korea, Oman, and Pakistan. In our constant pursuit
of new ways to help our students develop fluency and pronunciation we
thought we’d give drama/theatre a try.

With my (Angelica’s) background in
theatre, I began using drama techniques to teach my own English
language classes in the late 1990s. I immediately noticed this was
very helpful for learners’ oral development, especially among those
learners who were somewhat shy or reluctant to speak in class. I also
observed that during drama activities, students would practice
aspects of the language not typically offered in traditional language
classes: intonation, rhythm,
intention, meaning-making, improvisation, among others. Because my
drama classes were very well received, I was invited to develop a
language program for a prominent English language institute in São
Paulo, Brazil, which focused on teaching English through drama and
theatre. The program was later distributed among 17 other schools in
the country.

At first, teachers were hesitant to apply drama
techniques because they felt they had to be actors to do so. However,
after some initial short training sessions, teachers implemented
drama in their classroom and were quite satisfied with the positive
results. Despite teachers’ accounts of the success of drama in
their classes, I wondered what particular aspects of oral
communication actually improved. To find out, I proposed carrying out
a study during my Master’s program at Brock University, in Canada,
where Ron Thomson became my thesis supervisor. His extensive
background in second language oral fluency and pronunciation research
was a perfect match.

In drama/theatre classes, there is
quite a lot of speaking practice and both of us knew it was likely
that learners could develop speaking abilities anyway. But we were
interested in finding out whether drama classes could improve
learners’ speaking abilities compared to classes that also focused
on oral communication. We tracked the oral development of 24
Brazilian learners of English in four different classes over the
course of four months: two English drama classes and two English
communicative classes. We collected samples of their L2 speech in
five different tasks (monologue, dialogue, etc.) before and after the
program, all audio-recorded. We then recruited 30 Canadians to listen
to the learners’ speech samples and provide their perceptions on
three specific aspects of their oral performance: fluency,
comprehensibility and accent. After running several statistical
analyses, we found that learners in the drama group experienced
significantly greater improvement in their oral speaking skills
compared to learners in the traditional communicative language
classes.

Photo credit: João Urbilio

In particular, we found that learners
in the drama group experienced significant improvements in fluency
and comprehensibility compared to learners in a communicative
language class. Some of the strategies used in the drama classes had
a particular focus on improving fluency: learners practiced
performance in front of a group, speech with emphasis on
meaning-making, and speaking without inappropriate pauses and
hesitations. This result supports the idea that teaching aspects of
oral language explicitly can result in larger gains in oral fluency
compared to using simple communicative tasks.

Another important finding was that
although all the English learners were perceived as having a first
language (L1) accent (Brazilian Portuguese), this was not an issue
when understanding their speech. This is also important because it
tells us that having L1 accent is not a problem when communicating in
the L2. This can be surprising to some who falsely believe they need
to lose their L1 accent in order to be fluent in the L2. We have
always believed that “accent reduction” courses do not really have a place in language learning, and our
study provides evidence to support this belief.

If you’re interested in learning more
about how drama/theatre can improve speaking skills in a second
language, you can watch the video abstract of our study or read
the article we have recently published in TESOL Quarterly.
There, you will find more details about the study and its
methodology. We also provide samples of the classroom activities we
used.

Angelica Galante is a doctoral
candidate in Language and Literacies Education at the Ontario
Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of
Toronto and a sessional lecturer at York University. Her research
interests include innovative pedagogical applications in language
classrooms, drama in language learning, and plurilingual education.
You can follow her on Twitter @GalanteAngelica and visit her website
Breaking the Invisible Wall for
samples of digital projects with language learners.

Ron I. Thomson is an Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics/TESL at Brock
University, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. His research spans L2
oral fluency and pronunciation development, computer-assisted
pronunciation teaching, and ethics in pronunciation teaching. Ron is
also the creator of English Accent Coach, a free evidence-based online tool
that helps learners improve their pronunciation of English vowels and
consonants.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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